Mat

Perhaps we should define hacking and cracking somewhere on the site or the show. I know it's disputed in many circles but in my mind cracking is breaking into systems you have no business being in, and hacking is making new uses for existing or new things. You can 'hack' something together and you can 'crack' open a safe.

LinuxMCE ( http://linuxmce.com/ ) will help with what you want, there's many ways of doing it though, you will need to buy hardware and put effort in, but when completed you should have an impressive setup.

I need to set up an SNMP monitoring system at work. Ideally using a free and open source solution. It'd likely run in a VM but hardware could be provided for it if necessary. It should offer reporting capability but the important part is a wallboard style display, so I can have it showing on a large plasma screen in the IT office and if the board is green, everything is good, but a red flashing light means a server has just exploded - that sort of thing. I've been googling but I'm not finding anything I like so far, and recomendations?

Exactly, so you have no requirement for a stealth install then do you? Just install it yourself right at the keys, why would you need to deploy it in a way that the user would be unaware of it? If one of your friends says that they dont want to use your machine because there is a VNC icon in the tray, then that's their prerogative and their right. If they dont want their personal banking details to be seen by you when using one of your computers, then they should be able to make the informed choice to not log in there, do you not agree?

I've already said that there is no legitimate reason to accomplish what you are asking. Please explain WHY you want to be able to remote view and control another computer without the operator of that machine being aware of it, and I'll gladly tell you how to make it happen, unless doing so is illegal in your country of residence. Oh, and a response along the lines of "I dont have to tell you why I want it" will just mean that you dont have a legitimate reason and you are trying to do something blackhat without the skills needed.

There's a difference between hacking and cracking. There's no legitimate reason to need to do what you are asking, so I wont help you.

There's a HCL somewhere but as a general rule, the answer here would be 'No'. SCSI cards will work and it's common to connect tape drives to VM's but I've never heard of a tuner card working in a VM.

I hate to play the physics-geek here, but I have to call you out on the graphics card temperature/power consumption concept. If the graphics card were built of superconductors and kept at a few Kelvin, then it there would be a measurable difference in the losses caused by thermal production due to conductor resistance, but were talking about measurable only to a physics geek with access to sensitive equipment here. Cooling a video card a few degrees Celsius will have no noticeable difference on the overall power consumption. If the video card is cold then the entire rig will use less power as the fans will not be working as hard. A hot card will need more cooling and therefore more power, but it really does not take much current to spin a cooling fan. Also, I think the the power/cost/space consumed by hauling tanks of LN around could be put to better use by bringing an extra battery. A similar argument can be made the the low power hard drive. Swapping a drive for a replacement that uses 50mW less at idle will do little when the main cpu is using ~60W.

nullArray, Just to clarify, I didnt compare the iTunes backup process to an XP restore point, and I did say that the iTunes back up stores application data.

Quite true, that's why I linked to the regex tester which is a great tool to learn about constructing and testing these things. Man, day, fish etc...

I'm gonna have to ask then, how exactly does one create a restore point on an iphone that functions in the way you describe? The only 'restore points' that I am familiar with is on Windows XP and up, that allow for a sort of rollback of the OS to undo changes made by drivers and apps. I always turn that function off as is make installing something slower than it needs to be, but I'm sure that's not what we are talking about here. It cant be the backup process performed by iTunes, because that does backup applications and their save data, so I'm stumped.

One of perl's strengths is regular expressions. This online tool is helpful is making your regex http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ In your case you would want something like: if ($var = ~ gmi/complete/) {print "complete found"}

I'm curious about this point. If you download something from the app store, then you own it and wont be charged for it if you download it again, even if it was free the first time and now is not. Example. Buy a free app and install it on phone. Lose phone Buy new phone Download same app, a message appears telling you that it's free as you have already bought it, the current price is no longer relevant.

Yeah 3.5 ESX can be locally administered while 3.5ESXi can only be controlled from a remote web admin. My take on this though would be, instead of installing a driver for the unsupported NIC, just install a supported NIC instead?

Not really, I dont see how this is different to any other BSD or Linux based OS. You can always boot to single user mode on any of these systems and from there you can make a new admin user, no extra tools required. These OS's needed to be repairable long before bootable CD's and USB thumbs were available. The ability to create a new admin account on a computer and from there wreak damages is a concern, but if you allow unsupervised physical access to people with the knowledge and desire to do this then the outcome is not the fault of the software.

The network here has a cabinet with patch panels that are connected to the sockets in the rooms, and patch leads connect those to the switches. The only tracing needed would be to trace the cable from the switch cabinet, to the patch cabinet next to it. The patch panels are numbered and that number matched the number on the socket in the offices. Finding a physical device somewhere in this building from knowing only the switch port would be easy. I've no idea if the OP is configured in this way, but I'd imagine it to be standard.

It could be worth investigating RADIUS authentication at the switches, this would mean that computers other than ones you have authorised, would not get a network connection when plugged in.

Physical access defeats all password security always. On all operating systems. It wont defeat encryption, but if you are relying on passwords alone, even bios passwords, then physical access = you are screwed.

I've been running it for a few days but I DL'd from a torrent. I did download from MS yesterday just fine, I then checked the MD5 hashed of the real download to the torrent download and it was the same. I'd suggest just grabbing the torrent if you want the file. MS need to learn how to distribute code, the filename starts 7100.0.09.04.21 which looks like a date to me, if it was ready then, they should have just released it.

I'm pretty sure that you should have the routers set to the same SSID & encryption settings (even if that does mean 'none') but you should have them on different channels. I think that you will find this is your problem. Set them to different channels, like 1, 6 and 11, set the fourth to one of those but use the one that it cant see, so if the fourth AP can see 1 and 6 but 11 is too far away, then set it to 11. Here's a link that I found after typing this, I think it backs up what I'm saying: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/inquisitor/2996

Much more fun than a trivia question, this is great! I've done part one and two and I'm stuck on three. I just hope noone starts posting hints as that will spoil it. Darren, or whoever put this together, well done !

Picture to show it booting into Ubuntu :)

Well this discussion prompted me to hunt out my own Vaio C1, which has been gathering dust since I bought an Aspire One. I had previously fitted it with an 8GB SSD so I removed that and threw in a spare 100GB laptop drive and installed Ubuntu 9.04 onto it. It works, but it's pretty slow. Also the screen seemed to be driven at the wrong refresh rate for the first part of the bootup process. I rebuilt the kernel (which took about 5 hours to compile) and then the bootup worked fine and everything seems ok, a little faster too with the Crusoe optimisations. Working on it in console mode without loading GDM is a delight, working inside Gnome is pretty nasty though, due to the speed. So, it is possible to run the latest Ubuntu on a seven year old netbook, but it's not advisable. I love the sony, everything about it is better than the Acer, well everything apart from the speed, and the RAM maxing out at 384MB, and the lack of built in wireless, but other than that it's great. If Apple could build a replicate of this machine running modern hardware and OSX, I'd bite their hand off for it. For now though, unless you just have a thing for old hardware (like me) then your best bet it so sell it on eba, where I think they still command quite a premium, and buy a 10" aspire one or something.

You can compile a kernel from source and select the Transmeta Crusoe processor from the available options to get it customised. While in there you may want to removed kernel level drivers that support things they you dont have, such as sata drivers etc, this will make the kernel smaller to help with the small amount of ram you have. I speak from experience, I have a picturebook myself, C1MGP from memory.

Well I just tried again with a CentOS box that does not have a GUI, I set the IP and ran ping and powered the fon and got nothing. I now have the fon connected to a laptop and I'm trying the other method but that also seems to fail. I made and opened the two html files, but the errors shown in the writeup do not appear and the ssh port is not opened. This fon has a firmware of 3.1.1 r1, if that's of any help to anyone. Well digininja, thanks for your help, it looks like I'll be building a serial cable. I think I have a max232 chip around somewhere from when I built myself a nokia datacable many years back, I assume it's a similar process?